Mitchell Hashimoto, one of the founders of HashiCorp and lead developer behind Ghostty, a GPU-accelerated open-source terminal emulator launched in 2023, announced that the app has formally become a non-profit project through fiscal sponsorship by Hack Club, a registered 501©(3) organization.
In Ghostty’s case, Hack Club now manages compliance, donations, accounting, and public financial transparency. Hashimoto says this structure reinforces Ghostty’s commitment to remaining free and open source, provides legal assurances to users and contributors, and establishes a sustainable foundation beyond any single individual’s involvement.
GPU accelerated terminal emulators first came about in the mid aughts, though the modern ones that are good, the ones like gostty, really first showed up around 2015. the value for them is that rendering text can be a bottleneck in long-running operations on the terminal in a display environment (as opposed to a raw shell). i only know of one shell with ai features, warp, but i avoid proprietary tools that run system breaking actions so i can’t speak to how bullshit is